Booker T has some great WrestleMania moments he’s witnessed as a performer, fan and teacher.
During a recent interview with WrestleZone, Booker T was asked about some of his favorite WrestleMania moments of his career. Booker explained why he doesn’t have too many of his own matches that come to mind, then named a few classic matches he looks to when he’s training his students at Reality Of Wrestling.
“There’s only been a few matches for myself where I really think about it and they are memorable matches for myself. I don’t have any really big WrestleMania moments for myself. Honestly, I don’t, and it’s like that for most of my matches, I don’t remember a lot of my matches because I always say I never wrestled for the memory for myself, I wrestled for the memories for the fan to have. I was just doing my work, I was just the carpenter working. But guys like Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker, that’s a match that really stands out for me, just because I’m a trainer, I’m a teacher as well as I’m a student of the game and I watch two guys like Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker, both guys, together, they’re 100+ years old [laughs] and they go out there and perform better than everyone on the card,” Booker said. “They create a story that’s so compelling that everybody, everybody is on the edge of their seat at the end of that match.
“I implore young guys to go and watch what these guys did in that ring, from a Shakespearean, Romeo & Juliet, a Phantom of The Opera perspective and how to feel a certain way. Then you can go all the way back to [Ricky] Steamboat vs. [Randy] Savage from WrestleMania III and find the same compelling story being told to where, again, by the end, you’re on the edge of your seat,” he noted. “So, I’m talking about to matches like that, that really make me feel a certain way inside and again, from a teaching perspective that these guys can go back and say ‘man, this is what I gotta do to get to that level.’
“And not knocking — I have a lot of ‘hot takes’ but normally, my ‘hot takes’ are to try and school someone on how they can be better. They don’t realize it,” Booker added, “but that’s 100 percent what it’s normally about and that’s what I think about when you ask me a question. WrestleMania moments, those are two, man, that stand out man and burns in my brain because I’m trying to teach these young guys how to go out and be great.”
Booker T loses out on a shampoo commercial to Edge: SmackDown, February 28, 2002 https://t.co/cAfDS6tGJ2
— WrestleZone (@WRESTLEZONEcom) April 3, 2022
Booker T competed at WrestleMania six times in his career, the first match coming at WrestleMania X8 in Toronto against Edge. The two were feuding over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial, which sounds silly to some, but the feud still provides some memorable moments from that era. Booker was asked about his memories of that feud, and if he ever thought about trying to market a shampoo himself since product endorsements are more common today.
“It’s something I did think about for a second, especially since I have the long hair. It was crazy, most of the white guys, back then, had long hair and I had short hair, and now they’re bald and I got long hair. [laughs] So, it’s something that I thought about but that was a WrestleMania moment, for me, with Edge but I’ll tell you, behind the scenes, I think, I didn’t take that match as seriously as I should have because of what we were competing for. I didn’t think about that, with Edge, that could’ve been my WrestleMania moment. I think Edge was worried about doing the spinarooni more than anything, so he was practicing all day and he couldn’t do it,” Booker noted. “He had strawberries from the bruises all over his back from doing it all day, he was all bruised up trying to do the spinarooni. But I do remember that as a great time and it was in his hometown.”
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